Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to ..., Том 1

each field. If this assessment had never been exceeded, the ryots would have been in the comparatively advantageous position of peasant proprietors, subject to a heavy but a fixed quit-rent. The absence, however, of any real protection against illegal extortions, rendered this improvement in their condition rather nominal than real; and, except during the occasional accident of a humane and vigorous local administrator, the exactions had no practical limit but the inability of the ryot to pay more.

It was to this state of things that the English rulers of India succeeded; and they were, at an early period, struck with the importance of putting an end to this arbitrary character of the land-revenue, and imposing a fixed limit to the government demand. They did not attempt to go back to the Mogul valuation. It has been in general the very rational practice of the English government in India, to pay little regard to what was laid down as the theory of the native institutions, but to inquire into the rights which existed and were respected in practice, and to protect and enlarge those. For a long time, however, it blundered grievously about matters of fact, and grossly misunderstood the usages and rights which it found existing. Its mistakes arose from the inability of ordinary minds to imagine a state of social relations fundamentally different from those with which they are practically familiar. England being accustomed to great estates and great landlords, the English rulers took it for granted that India must possess the like; and looking round for some set of people who might be mistaken for the objects of their search, they pitched upon a sort of tax-gatherers called Zemindars. “ The zemindar,” says the philosophical historian of India, * “ had some of the attributes which belong to a land-owner ; he collected the rents of a particular district, he governed
the cultivators of that district, lived in comparative splendor, and his son succeeded him when he died. The zemindars, therefore, it was inferred without delay, were the proprietors of the soil, the landed nobility and gentry of India. It was not considered that the zemindars, though they collected the rents, did not keep them ; but paid them all away, with a small deduction, to the government. It was not considered that if they governed the ryots, and in many respects exercised over them despotic power, they did not govern them as tenants of theirs, holding their lands either at will or by contract under them. The possession of the ryot was an hereditary possession ; for which it was unlawful for the zemindar to displace him ; for every farthing which the zemindar drew from the ryot, he was bound to account; and it was only by fraud, if out of all that he collected, he retained an ana more than the small proportion which, as pay for collection, he was permitted to receive.”

* Mill's History of British India, book vi. ch. 5.

“ There was an opportunity in India," continues the historian, “ to which the history of the world presents not a parallel. Next after the sovereign, the immediate cultivators had, by far, the greatest portion of interest in the soil. For the rights (such as they were ) of the zemindars, a complete compensation might have easily been made. The generous resolution was adopted, of sacrificing to the improvement of the country, the proprietary rights of the sovereign. The motives to improvement which property gives, and of which the power was so justly appreciated, might have been bestowed upon those upon whom they would have operated with a force incomparably greater than that with which they could operate upon any other class of men; they might have been bestowed upon those from whom alone, in every country, the principal improvements in agriculture must be derived, the immediate cultivators of the soil. And a measure worthy to be ranked among the noblest that ever were taken for the improvement of any

country, might have helped to compensate the people of India for the miseries of that misgovernment which they had so long endured. But the legislators were English aristocrats; and aristocratical prejudices prevailed.”

The measure proved a total failure, as to the main effects which its well-meaning promoters expected from it. Unaccustomed to estimate the mode in which the operation of any given institutions is modified even by such variety of circumstances as exists within a single kingdom, they flattered themselves that they had created, throughout the Bengal provinces, English landlords, and it proved that they had only created Irish ones. The new landed aristocracy disappointed every expectation built upon them. They did nothing for the improvement of their estates, but everything for their own ruin. The same pains not being taken, as has been taken in Ireland, to enable landlords to defy the consequences of their improvidence, the whole land of Bengal had to be sequestrated and sold, for debt or arrears of revenue, and in one generation the ancient zemindars had ceased to exist. Other families, mostly the descendants of Calcutta money dealers, now occupy their place, and live as useless drones upon the soil which has been given up to them. Whatever the government has sacrificed of its pecuniary claims, for the creation of such a class, has at the best been wasted.

But in this ill-judged measure there was one redeeming point, to which may probably be ascribed all the progress which the Bengal provinces have since made in production and in amount of revenue. The ryots were reduced, indeed, to the rank of tenants of the zemindar; but tenants with fixity of tenure. The rents were left to the zemindars to fix at their discretion; but once fixed, were never more to be altered. This is now the law and practice of landed tenure, in the most flourishing part of the British Indian dominions.

In the parts of India into which the British rule has been more recently introduced, the blunder has been avoided of endowing a useless body of great landlords with gifts from the public revenue; but along with the evil, the good also has been left undone. The government has done less for the ryots than it has required to be done for them by the landlords of its creation. In the greater part of India, the immediate cultivators have never yet obtained a perpetuity of tenure at a fixed rent. The government manages the land on the principle on which a good Irish landlord manages his estate; not putting it up to competition, not asking the cultivators what they will promise to pay, but determining for itself what they can afford to pay, and defining its demand accordingly. In some places it makes its arrangements with the ryots individually, in others with the village communities, leaving them to apportion the demand according to usage or agreement. Sometimes the rent is fixed only for one year, sometimes for three, or five; but the tendency of recent policy is towards long leases, extending, in the northern provinces of India, to a term of thirty years, with conditional renewal for twenty more. This arrangement has not existed for a sufficient time to have shown by experience, how far the motives which the long lease creates in the minds of the cultivators, fall short of the beneficial influence of a perpetual settlement. But the two plans, of annual settlements and of short leases, are irrevocably condemned. They can only be said to have succeeded, in comparison with the unlimited oppression which existed before. They are approved by nobody, and were never looked upon in any other light than as temporary arrangements, to be abandoned when a more complete knowledge of the capabilities of the country should afford data for something more permanent.

385

CHAPTER X.

MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY.

§ 1. The question, what is to be done with a cottier population ? which in any case would have been a fit. subject for consideration in a work like the present, is to the English government at this time the most urgent of practical questions. The majority of a population of eight millions, having long grovelled in helpless inertness and abject poverty under the cottier system ; reduced by its operation to mere food of the cheapest description, and to an incapacity of either doing or willing anything for the improvement of their lot; have at last, by the failure of that lowest quality of food, been plunged into a state in which the alternative is death, or to be permanently supported by other people, or a radical change in the economical arrangements under which it has hitherto been their misfortune to live. Such an emergency has compelled attention to the subject from the legislature and from the nation, but it can hardly as yet be said, with much result; for, the evil having originated in a system of land tenancy which withdrew from the people every motive to industry or thrift except the fear of starvation, the remedy provided by Parliament was to take away even that, by conferring on them a legal claim to eleemosynary support; while, towards correcting the cause of the mischief, nothing was done, beyond vain complaints, though at the price to the national treasury of ten millions sterling for one year's delay.

I presume it is needless to expend any argument in proving that the very foundation of the economical evils of Ireland is the cottier system; that while peasant rents fixed VOL. I.